During the summer of 1965, Sir Kingsley Amis discovered that his teenage sons, Martin and Philip, had recently lost their virginity.

Ever the doting father, he decided that the occasion warranted immediate celebration. So the boys were whisked off to a fashionable restaurant in London’s Soho.

‘After lunch, [our father] led us to an ambiguous little outlet in a side street north of Piccadilly,’ Martin later recalled. ‘He bought for us there, among the Brylcreem jars and the jockstraps and the hernia supports, a gross of condoms: 144.’

‘Of course, the gift was largely symbolic: it represented the all-clear. But it also represented a saving of 14 pounds and 12 shillings, and saved us a total of 48 visits to the chemist’s.’

Martin, who was 15 at the time, initially put this display of paternal affection down to his novelist father being ‘just thrilled we’re not queer’.

But in recent years, he’s come to a different view. It represented, he now believes, the passing of a flame — from one of post-war literature’s foremost womanisers to two impressionable teenage sons whom he hoped would grow up in his own image.

‘A promiscuous man, in the days when it took a lot of energy to be a promiscuous man, Kingsley was excited by his contiguousness to yet more promiscuity,’ Martin declared in his best-selling 2000 memoir, Experience. If that interpretation is to be believed, we can safely assume that Amis Snr, who died in 1995, aged 73, went on to follow his youngest son’s life and times with great pride.

A chip off the old block, in life as well as art, Martin would display not only his father’s talent — becoming one of his generation’s most acclaimed writers — but also his rampaging libido.

Like Sir Kingsley, the serial philanderer proudly devoted his youth to sleeping around literary London. Like Sir Kingsley, he later created a headline-grabbing scandal by walking out on his first wife and their young children.

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But a relentless sexual appetite in his youth is not the only dubious character trait that Martin, 64, seems to have been bequeathed by his father.

In literary circles, academia, and the court of public opinion, he has — with unerring frequency — been accused of inheriting Sir Kingsley’s worst flaws, from greed and egotism to vanity, arrogance, selfishness and old-fashioned pomposity.

To many critics, particularly those of a feminist persuasion, the ugliest of the oft-levelled charges against Martin Amis, however, is that he’s also an unreconstructed misogynist. A patronising, one-dimensional and sometimes violent attitude towards women has for decades pervaded everything about his work, they argue.

The misogyny extends from his novels, which tend to boast grotesquely sexist male protagonists (and objectified female sidekicks), to his morally ambiguous love life, and sometimes controversial public pronouncements.

Over the years, the charge of misogyny against Amis has often reared its head, costing him fans and friendships in this often politically correct industry, along with at least one Booker prize — more of which later.

It is, of course, a charge Amis fiercely disputes.

‘I’m not a misogynist. Ask my wife,’ he once told an interviewer. ‘Do you think she would have put up with me for 13 years if I was a misogynist? Thoughtful people are not misogynists.’

Martin was 12 years old when his father, Kingsley, walked out on his mother, Hilly (both pictured)

Yet for all his protestations, the issue continues to plague him — helped, no doubt, by the author’s arguably sexist pronouncements during his occasional forays into the public eye.

Take, for example, Martin’s response this week to an interview question regarding the portrayal of women in 18th century literature.

‘In that formative period of the English novel, the only way that a heroine can have sex is by being drugged and that ties in with fantasies, female fantasies of being ravished,’ he declared.

‘I talked to women about this, and they said it’s a good fantasy, especially when you’re young, because if you enjoy it, it’s not your fault.’

Naturally, this brouhaha created headlines, which no doubt helped publicise Martin’s forthcoming BBC series about England and Englishness. But, while he perhaps revels in creating a stir, it also has served as powerful grist to the mill of those who believe this grizzled controversialist is slowly but surely turning into his father.

‘The comments are, on the face of it, appalling,’ says his biographer Professor James Diedrick, the author of Understanding Martin Amis. ‘They might have been spoken by some of the worst misogynists in his novels.’

‘Martin has always operated according to the adage that no publicity is bad publicity. But this sort of thing suggests that he’s inheriting the patriarchal views of his father.’

Sir Kingsley was, after all, a copper-bottomed misogynist, who believed women to be ‘sexually inferior’ and ‘pests’.

His view of the fairer sex was summed up in a letter to his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, in the 1960s: ‘Women appear to me as basically dull but as basically pathetic, too.’

A chip off the old block, in life as well as art, Martin (pictured) would display not only his father's talent - becoming one of his generation's most acclaimed writers - but also his rampaging libido

That was five decades ago. Yet as he enters his tea-time years, Martin is increasingly accused, even by old friends, of sharing much of his father’s outmoded world-view.

One such critic has been Anna Ford, the newsreader whose late husband, the publisher and cartoonist Mark Boxer, was such great friends with Martin that he made Amis godfather to their daughter, Claire.

Not long ago, Ford sent an extraordinary public letter to the Guardian newspaper calling Amis a ‘whingeing narcissist’ with ‘social autism’.

‘He treats women like his inferiors. He is such a curmudgeon and is changing into the same man his father Kingsley was,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he is able to relate properly or understands their feelings. It’s all about how he sees things.’

Many are former girlfriends and lovers. Both men boast a vast number, having achieved fame at a relatively early age and then dedicated themselves to exploiting the romantic opportunities it brought.

Kingsley slept with dozens of women following the publication of his best-selling debut novel Lucky Jim in 1954, including the writer Mavis Nicholson and poet Philip Larkin’s friend Ruth Bowman — despite being married to Martin’s mother, Hilary Bardwell, a union that survived 17 years.

A famous black-and-white photo, taken on a beach in Yugoslavia in 1963, shows him asleep on the sand with the slogan ‘1 fat Englishman — I f*** anything’ written angrily on his back, in his wife’s lipstick.

Martin’s love life in the 1970s and Eighties (he achieved fame at 24, with 1973’s The Rachel Papers) was similarly vigorous. Conquests included everyone from Tina Brown, the magazine editor, to writer Claire Tomalin, aristocrat Victoria Rothschild and artist Lamorna Seale (the wife of a friend, she killed herself two years after giving birth to their love child, Delilah, now 37).

Journalist Emma Soames, who Martin also cheated on, has told how he wore stacked shoes ‘a la Monsieur Sarkozy’ to compensate for his stature (he’s a mere 5ft 4in tall).

In a famous echo of his father, who was often accused of physical vanity, Martin would later change his appearance further, spending £20,000 on dentistry in the 1990s — although he has always insisted this was undergone for medical reasons. He described ‘lifelong dental trouble’ that had been the ‘bane of my life’

Another journalist, Julie Kavanagh, wrote a revelatory kiss-and-tell article about their ill-fated relationship, which began in 1974, and was marked (on his part) by serial philandery and boorishness. After they moved in together, she said Martin ‘showed himself to have his father’s gift for being extremely good at not helping with any housework, the source of my name for him, “Lazy S***”.’

He would spend evenings horizontal on a sofa ‘chuckling away as he re-read his own prose — something he did a lot’, while Julie cooked.

Once, at a restaurant with author Clive James and the critic Lorna Sage, Julie noted: ‘I thought that Martin and Lorna were doing more than just sitting side by side, and after picking up the fork I’d dropped, had my suspicions confirmed.’

Julie does not specify exactly what it was she had witnessed, but commented: ‘This was Martin at his worst: nasty, facetious, and belittling.’

This photograph shows Martin with his father in Notting Hill, London, in September 1989

It was also a case of Martin echoing his father, who in the 1950s, while teaching at Swansea University, was in the habit of attempting to seduce female dinner party guests by inviting them to visit his greenhouse.

‘During a long, drunken Saturday evening, Kingsley disappeared into the garden with each of the women in the party,’ Amis’s friend, writer Al Alvarez, once recalled.

‘While they were gone, the rest of us sat around trying to make conversation and pretending not to be embarrassed. Half an hour later, our host and whichever lucky lady had gone with him sauntered back in, smoothing their clothes and hair.’

Martin and Kingsley also share an uncannily similar track record when it comes to their patronage of the sex industry, judging by the recollections of prominent friends.

The late journalist Christopher Hitchens, for example, once recalled a visit to a New York brothel with Amis Jnr in the 1980s: ‘Martin came round to my office . . . and announced: “I’m going to this parlour and you’re coming with me.”’

Hitchens described the venue as ‘unlike anything I had previously experienced, indescribably sordid.’Sir Kingsley, for his part, frequented the strip clubs and sex shops of Soho, usually after lunches with his friend, the writer Robert Conquest.

‘After these lunches, they would drop by to a few “adulty” book and magazine shops,’ writes Kingsley’s biographer, Zachary Leader. One of the strip clubs they visited is immortalised in Sir Kingsley’s 1955 novel That Uncertain Feeling, where the protagonist encounters a dozen women in ‘spangles and sequins’, who are ‘rushing to and fro as in an octuplet game of squash’.

The most obvious personal echo between father and son, however, would emerge in the breakdown of their first marriages. Martin was 12 years old when Kingsley walked out on his mother, Hilly, leaving her and their three children for the fashionable writer Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Martin, who is now 64, is pictured here as a boy

‘It had a terrible impact on him. It was so bad, his schoolwork suffered,’ Hilly, who died in 2010, once told the Mail, adding that her son was so traumatised that he vowed ‘to never leave my wife when I grow up’.

Fast forward 35 years, however, and Martin did just that, leaving first wife Antonia Phillips, the mother of his sons Louis and Jacob, for her close friend, the American writer and heiress Isabel Fonseca.

Hilly later said that he ‘has probably been a bit of a s***’ with women, adding that he inherited a ‘fairly ruthless streak’ from Sir Kingsley. ‘Anyone who leaves a family has to be ruthless. And they both did.’

Over the years, a vigorous debate about both Martin and Sir Kingsley’s treatment of women in their fiction has transfixed the literary world.

Feminists never warmed to the work of Amis Snr, where the prevailing tone is perhaps best summed up by a 1987 poem where he wrote that ‘women and queers and children cry when things go wrong’ whereas men ‘hold the world together with rueful grins’. He was, however, unaffected by their criticism, particularly as his career progressed.

Indeed, the jacket blurb on his 1984 book Stanley And The Women — about a serial philanderer called Stanley Duke who believed ‘all women are mad’ — admitted that it was ‘not a book that is likely to win many prizes for fairness or fashionable social attitudes’.

To many critics, particularly those of a feminist persuasion, the ugliest of the oft-levelled charges against Martin Amis, is that he's also an unreconstructed misogynist

Martin, however, vigorously contests allegations of sexism in his own work, arguing that the many misogynistic characters in his books are intended to be the butt of satire.

Nonetheless, controversy over his portrayal of women cost him the 1989 Booker Prize, when two judges, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, refused to allow his novel London Fields on to the shortlist.

Similar views have been shared by cultural commentators such as Julie Burchill, Germaine Greer and historian Marina Warner. In a newspaper article written on Martin Amis’s 60th birthday, Warner declared: ‘I read him with a mongoose fascination for his unrepentant misogyny.’

In 2007, meanwhile, the Marxist academic Terry Eagleton called Sir Kingsley ‘a racist, anti-Semitic bore, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals,’ adding that: ‘Amis fils has clearly learned more from [his father] than how to turn a shapely phrase.’

Undeterred, unrepentant, Martin keeps on churning out the best-sellers and continues to stick his head above the parapet.

Indeed, no sooner had his comments about ‘ravishment’ made headlines this week than he was gleefully declaring, in a second interview, that Sir Kingsley used to ‘fantasise’ about intimate encounters with Her Majesty the Queen. Was this, like so many of his edgier pronouncements, a cynical attempt to create controversy? Or a startling insight into his father’s wayward mind?

Either way, if Sir Kingsley were alive, he would, like many a proud father, regard his equally famous son as a man after his own heart.